PSC: More customers restored in less time

Mar. 23, 2014

Lansing Board of Water and Light employees Jim Crane (left) and Mick Smith trim ice covered branches away from power lines on Christmas Eve as they work on restoring power to homes in the Delta River Drive area of Lansing. / Greg DeRuiter/Lansing State Journal

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Fallen trees and downed electrical lines are seen near the corner of E. Kalamazoo Street and Holmes Road on Lansing's east side five days after December's ice storm. / MATTHEW DAE SMITH | for the Lansing State Journal

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In response to December’s devastating ice storm, Consumers Energy restored power to almost twice as many customers in Ingham, Eaton and Clinton counties and finished three days sooner than the Lansing Board of Water & Light, utility and Public Service Commission records show.

BWL completed power restoration to an estimated 38,582 customers on Jan. 1 compared to Consumers’ Dec. 29 completion of restoration to an estimated 71,300 customers in the three-county area — and another 317,000 statewide, according to the records.

While Consumers (7,500 employees) and BWL (677 employees) resist apples-to-apples comparisons, Consumers’ customer base is just 10.7 percent larger than BWL’s in the three capital-area counties.

City of Lansing-owned BWL says it had 96,454 customers in the three counties when the storm struck. It estimated 40 percent of them lost power – an “unprecedented” loss in the history of Michigan utilities, according to BWL General Manager J. Peter Lark.

Jackson-based Consumers told the PSC the ice storm knocked out power to 66 percent of the 108,100 customers it serves in the three-county area.

BWL and Consumers serve most of the residential, business and industrial customers in the three counties. The PSC regulates Michigan’s investor-owned electric utilities and co-ops but not municipally-owned utilities such as BWL.

The PSC directed Consumers and DTE Electric to file reports addressing the extended outage that affected about 600,000 of their customers across the state. On March 10, the PSC staff released its conclusions — some of which conflict with post-storm statements made by Lark and published in BWL’s internal review.

BWL reported its findings on Feb. 18 and is cooperating with a citizens group that is assessing BWL’s handling of the ice-storm outage.

Efforts hampered

Forty percent of BWL’s customer base would be 38,582 – or slightly more than half the number of Consumers customers who lost power in the same three counties.

Power was restored to 99 percent of Consumers customers by the end of Dec. 28, spokesman Brian Wheeler said. The last 1 percent got their power back on Dec. 29, he said.

BWL said it restored power to a “substantial” number of its customers by the end of Dec. 25 and quantified “substantial” as 90 percent in its after-incident report. BWL said it completed restoration to all customers on New Year’s morning.

BWL characterized the time it took to restore power as “neither better nor worse than other similar restoration efforts” based on national data about large-impact storms.

Lark frequently cites the substantial, 90 percent restoration by the end of Christmas Day as a positive measure of the utility’s response.

But, BWL’s outage-tracking efforts were hampered by the failure of key software and problems with its customer service phone lines, raising questions about the basis for the restoration claim.

BWL “could not accurately determine all the customers who were without power … (and) could not adequately communicate with customers,” George Stojic, BWL’s director of strategic planning, told state lawmakers on Jan. 21.

“Two important components of the BWL’s outage management system … were not working,” BWL said in its internal report. As a result, BWL provided customers with “inaccurate and contradictory information.”

On Dec. 28, for example, BWL’s outage count jumped 50 percent from the previous day, in part because the utility identified streets and neighborhoods that had been without power for up to a week.

Last week, Dennis Louney, vice chairman of the BWL Board of Commissioners, said in an interview he was not aware of evidence that supported the claim of substantial, 90 percent restoration by the end of Christmas Day. After consulting with Lark, he said the claim was an estimate BWL executives felt comfortable with.

“I can’t tell you if we hit exact targets,” Louney said.

“I agree it’s kind of misleading” if the restoration claim is not identified as an estimate, he said.

BWL has provided the citizens review team with 6,400 pages of documents, but on Thursday team spokesman T.J. Bucholz said, “I don’t believe we’ve seen data that substantiates that claim yet or quantifies that number (90 percent).”

Took a little heat

BWL’s internal report, which Lansing Mayor Virg Bernero has asked the PSC to evaluate, repeated Lark’s frequent claim that neither BWL nor any other Michigan utility had ever experienced an outage affecting so large a percentage of its customers.

BWL said the storm knocked out power to only 23 percent of Consumers customers. But, Consumers’ 23 percent applied to an area stretching from Michigan’s southern border to the top of the Lower Peninsula and from Lake Michigan to Lake Huron — 61 counties total, several of which experienced outages of 1 percent or less.

In Mid-Michigan, the impact of the storm on Consumers was statistically greater than on BWL’s service area as two of every three of Consumers’ customers lost power across Ingham, Clinton and Eaton counties.

Only two counties served by Consumers — Genesee and Kent — suffered more customer outages than Consumers recorded in Ingham County.

Lark told last week’s joint meeting of the BWL Board and the Lansing City Council “it seems like we’ve been done wrong a little bit” in news coverage and at the Legislature.

“We took quite a little heat for our (Stojic’s) response” to questioning by members of the House Energy and Technology Committee, Lark said.

“After the PSC reviewed Consumers Energy, we find out when it comes to mutual aid people, they had seven (line) crews the first two days. We had six. They had 400,000 people out (of power). We had 40,000 out,” Lark said.

The PSC staff did fault Consumers for having only seven mutual aid crews in the field on Dec. 21 and 22. But their report also said those crews were supplemented by 19 of the company’s line crews and 16 in-state contractor crews on Dec. 21 and by 74 company crews and 42 in-state contractor crews on Dec. 22.

Internal review

BWL’s internal review reported no mutual aid crews were at work or en route on Dec. 21. On Dec. 22, six mutual aid crews were in transit or had arrived to help. The number of mutual aid crews remained at six (18 line workers) through Dec. 26, according to documents BWL provided to the community review team.

According to BWL’s report, three of its line crews were on call Dec. 21 and “all available” BWL crews were activated Dec. 22. Lark said BWL had six or seven line crews on staff when the storm hit.

Without admitting BWL was understaffed or lacked sufficient mutual aid support, Lark quickly pledged to hire additional line workers and signed new mutual aid agreements with the American Public Power Association and three electrical contractors while continuing to negotiate a mutual aid pact with DTE.

“We were better prepared than you might have thought,” Lark told city council and board members last week. “… If you look at other utilities and their response, you sometimes find that our response was rather typical or in some ways better than others.”